ASSASSINS ANONYMOUS

A former assassin fights to remain retired.

Mark is good at killing. After honing his skills as a Navy SEAL, he became an infamous hitman known as the Pale Horse, taking freelance gigs while also working for a clandestine deep-state organization dubbed the Agency. Then, last Christmas, something happened that caused him to quit cold turkey. Thanks to Assassins Anonymous, a support group designed to help people like him transition into a new way of life, Mark is just days away from receiving his one-year chip when a Mohawk-sporting Russian with prison tattoos jumps him, stabs him in the side, and flees. Mark manages to make it from the Lower East Side to the Bowery, where a black-market trauma surgeon named Astrid patches him up, but when he returns to his West Village apartment to retrieve the cash to pay her, he finds the place in flames. He ducks into his favorite local haunt to collect himself, only for the bartender to pass him a note from his Russian attacker that reads simply: SHE’S PRETTY. With Astrid now in danger, Mark has no choice but to bring her along on his desperate quest to uncover who wants him dead and why. Despite Mark’s insistence that “being an assassin is nothing like John Wick,” Hart’s latest wears its myriad cinematic influences on its sleeve. Escalating stakes and precisely choreographed action sequences keep the pages turning, but a slew of increasingly gonzo twists skew the tone toward camp—a vibe underscored by Mark’s droll yet angsty first-person-present narration. Though Hart often mistakes quirk for character development, the scenes Mark shares with his fellow recovering murder addicts impart some nice emotional resonance, helping to ground the tale and lend it heft.

Bombastic whiz-bang fun.